Edward Said -The tallest intellectual of our time.

I would like to thank Gautam for bringing in Said into the discussion and i will continue from where he left .


Edward Said remained as the voice of the voice less from almost half a century .His orientalism laid the foundation for most the intellectual debate about the Orient. Let me begin by dispensing certain definitions for a better understanding of the article.

The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West.

Orientalism is "a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient." It is the image of the 'Orient' expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship.

The first 'Orientalists' were 19th century scholars who translated the writings of 'the Orient' into English, based on the assumption that a truly effective colonial conquest required knowledge of the conquered peoples. This idea of knowledge as power is present throughout Said's critique. By knowing the Orient, the West came to own it. The Orient became the studied, the seen, the observed, the object; Orientalist scholars were the students, the seers, the observers, the subject. The Orient was passive; the West was active.

The western argument was very simple. East should be dominated and west shows it by conquering them.West knows what is right for the east because it knows its culture right from the dawn of civilization (as in Egypt) through scholarship (learning; knowledge acquired by study).So the west knows what is right for the east .

What is considered the Orient is a vast region, one that spreads across a myriad of cultures and countries. It includes most of Asia as well as the Middle East. The depiction of this single 'Orient' which can be studied as a cohesive whole is one of the most powerful accomplishments of Orientalist scholars. It essentializes an image of a prototypical Oriental--a biological inferior that is culturally backward, peculiar, and unchanging--to be depicted in dominating and sexual terms. The discourse and visual imagery of Orientalism is laced with notions of power and superiority, formulated initially to facilitate a colonizing mission on the part of the West and perpetuated through a wide variety of discourses and policies. The language is critical to the construction. The feminine and weak Orient awaits the dominance of the West; it is a defenseless and unintelligent whole that exists for, and in terms of, its Western counterpart. The importance of such a construction is that it creates a single subject matter where none existed, a compilation of previously unspoken notions of the Other. Since the notion of the Orient is created by the Orientalist, it exists solely for him or her. Its identity is defined by the scholar who gives it life.

Said argues that Orientalism can be found in current Western depictions of "Arab" cultures. The depictions of "the Arab" as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and--perhaps most importantly--prototypical, are ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved. These notions are trusted as foundations for both ideologies and policies developed by the Occident. Said writes: "The hold these instruments have on the mind is increased by the institutions built around them. For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now culminates into the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force.

The implications of this understanding can take us very far in our understanding of cultures and respecting Nations' sovereignty .This attitude of the west has not changed much of the last century even though the empire is no more.But the dirty things it left behind still lives on in the form of Palestine , Iraq and may be Iran in the future,and much of the impoverished Africa.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
Suggestion:
One of the best books i ever laid my hands on was After The Last Sky by Said and another Photo Journalist Mohr A very personal text, and a very moving one, about an internal struggle: the anguish of living with displacement, with exile. The most beautiful piece of prose about what it means to be a Palestinian.